React starter project with webpack and PHP

Nov 12, 2015

I’ve been delving into React lately and have started to use it more and more for projects. Previously I was using Gulp to run my builds, but I wanted to try out webpack. It was rather confusing at first, but after watching Joe Eames’s excellent Webpack Fundamentals course I got it working.

Inspired by Christian Alfoni’s ultimate webpack setup, I decided to create a React starter application that I could use as a template when starting new projects. Here is what I came up with:

React applications are often served using a node server like Express. However, in my case I wanted to use Apache because we use PHP to manage user authentication. I know there are packages that theoretically can make Express serve PHP, but it was easier to just use our existing Apache server.